ENOVIA VPM Knowledge Standardization

ENOVIA® VPM Knowledge Standardization allows domain experts to institutionalize how conceptual part features are defined and guarantees established rules are followed to avoid mistakes and rework.

The V6 offering delivers a range of authoring applications (CATIA®, DELMIA®, and SIMULIA®) to address a company’s engineering processes. Domain experts, who are not necessarily IT users, can tailor these applications to better fulfill the needs of their company’s engineering processes. Two types of basic changes are supported:

Edit and deploy engineering rules to modify the default behavior of application commands. There are two types of rule intent:

- “Validation” business rules can prevent an operation with an error/warning message, if not valid. An example would be to warn or prevent the user from adding more than a defined number of branches into a single electrical support.

- “Execution” business rules modify the default behavior of a given VPM domain. An example would be to specify a specific formula to be used to compute the diameter of a branch based on its wires diameters, or to apply a color to the functional/logical 2D representations depending on the value of a given attribute.

- Specialize object type definition to match a specific semantic by deriving applicative object types in the representation and by adding attributes to these derived types. Designers can then use these specialized objects in the native applications with attributes perfectly aligned with their domain process.

Reduce time to market by skipping steps of the development process thus being automated and rationalize through Knowledge management

Creating and Deploying a Business Rule

Domain experts can create business rules using the Project Resources Management workbench available with ENOVIA® VPM Central™. The list of the domains supporting the resource deployment is displayed directly when invoking the Project Resource Management workbench.
Domain experts apply business rules to a given domain’s supported events. A rule is written with the Enterprise Knowledge Language (EKL) syntax. ENOVIA VPM Knowledge Standardization provides a smart and intuitive script editor compliant with EKL. The rule editor is associated to an object browser and a wizard to simplify the edition and the debug of rules.
The newly created business rules are linked to a resource table to tailor system behavior. The resource table is then linked to an organization project using the “Project Resource Management” workbench. As a result, any user connected to the project for which the business rule has been deployed inherits the new behavior.
Only one “execution” rule that creates or modifies model data can be associated to a domain event. If it is not the case, an error occurs. There is no limitation to the number of validation rules that can be associated to a single domain event.

Specializing objects to define a specific semantic

Most CATIA domains enable creation of objects types (inside a representation) like a hole, a filet or a cavity. Some of these domains also allow specific semantic for specialize the object definition . ENOVIA Knowledge Standardization provides the “Types Customization” workbench which allows domain experts to build a dictionary. This dictionary contains the definition of a hierarchy of types derived from the standard product features.
To be effective, the dictionary has to be associated to a distinct organization project with the Project Resource Management workbench by dragging and dropping the resource table associated to the dictionary towards the targeted organization project. Therefore, any user connected to the project on which a dictionary has been deployed inherits the new semantic. When creating an object which has been derived, the designer can select what kind of sub-type he wants to create and fill the values of the customized attributes.
Derived objects are totally integrated to the knowledge environment. Business rules can be defined by domain experts on derived objects for validation or execution purpose. Formulas and report are also compliant with such tailored objects.